


Death: Strange Aeons

by TheLightdancer



Category: The Sandman (Comics)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2020-05-31 10:31:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19424158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: In the time before life formed in the planets orbited by the star Sol, and after the Parliament of Beings that decided all that was or would be, the youthful Death of the Endless has grown weary of the burden of her responsibilities. Smashing her portraits in her gallery, she has abandoned her duty, and her realm. Seeking a distant realm that exists within and without time and space, she seeks to make sense of herself without her duties. But with Death itself having ceased, reality trembles. Will mortals celebrate a world without Death?





	1. Out of the Nothingness of Sleep, the Slow Dreams of Eternity

**The realm of Death, Aeons before life exists in the Solar System:**

Death looked at her realm, which by the standards of her brother Dream's barely qualified as a realm at all (she huffed, inwardly. Dream was so naive. Her presiding over and embodying the Sunless lands was a realm in itself but there was not and is not some great task in ruling a realm purely seen as what others wished to see, only existence) but by the standards of her brother Destiny, her sister Despair, her sister Delight, and even Desire and Destruction, had something different. In the realm of Death, a bed, a teddy bear that was now packed in her suitcase, a collection of headwear that had always existed and yet did not. And her goldfish, whom Death with a kindly smile decided to snap her fingers facing them, sending them for a time to her sister Delight. She knew her sister would take care of the fish.

The job had worn her down, it was one thing to feel progressively more despised and hated, and to occasionally flaunt that in the face of gatherings like that Parliament. A gathering to suggest a gathering, one to define and bind all that existed under specific rules to limit their power. Absurd. It was quite another to have so many mortals blame her for their own folly, or treating her like failure. A few even were so foolish as to try to attack her or bind her, though only one had dared try using her true name, and while he had spoken it, a glare from her and a brief transformation of herself into her True Form, the form that was beyond the sight of mortals, had enabled her to collect his soul and that was that. That time, however, had been the final straw. None of her siblings had cared, and while she forgave Dream that given he was captive at the time, it was much harder to accept how much even her own family, her own parents despised her.

The loneliness got to her too, over time, because not one of her siblings ever reached out to her save when they wished something, while going to them alone was so one-sided that it was neither just nor desirable.

And so was it that the attempt of the child of the Empire of Tears, the arrogant preening demon that was the last of his kind, banished to inchoate energy, forever rumbling that name _Trigon Trigon Trigon_ in a deaf dimension that was uncaring had just.....

She clenched her fists, nostrils flaring, and breathed deeply. For a moment her eyes became golden suns and she blinked harder and shook her head. No. She had a function. She could go beyond it but if she went that route there was so much trouble there....

Shaking her head, she finished taking her clothes and putting them in her suitcase. Making sure her umbrella was beside her table in front of her couch, Death of the Endless strode to her gallery. With a serenity and grace only Destruction and Desire knew she fully possessed, she took up a sledgehammer, and then six terrible aether-shrieks and blinding Unlight followed. First, with her hands slightly trembling and the sledgehammer groaning like the keening of an animal yet to exist from the vibrations, was a portrait with the newly altered sigil that was what it had always been, the skull of Dream's captor. Then one with a heart. Then one with a multi-colored swirl. Then one with a hook. Then one with a bright sword, and then finally, one with a book.

 _There, done._ With that her smile was a kindly, genteel one, the smile that would become her norm from older aeons, but here was a flash of warmth in a cold and sorrowful figure who had had her limit.

Taking her suitcase in her right hand and her umbrella in her left, she then with a slight inclination of her head opened a portal to the otherworldly place she'd found, outside all that was. A beautiful place, this. Crimson clouds, bright green skies, a realm uninhabited, as far as she knew. With a sad sigh, she went over to her apartment's light and clicked it off. Darkness fell on the realm of Death and a fell wind gusted through it as frost began to spread over everything.

_Try and bind me for the crime of doing my job, will they? Then they get their wish. No more Death._

Death stepped through the portal, and at one single instance across all that was or would ever be, death ground to a halt and ceased to exist, and all that existed in time and space gazed in shock and awe, and then the cheers started. Such was the delight among mortals that only the wisest of them dared to question whether this would prove as beneficent as otherwise. In his realm, Destiny paced among his statues and then froze in sudden shock, blind eyes gazing with widened horror. He moved to the galleries of the Endless, and saw what he'd believed erroneous somehow, even hoped that it would be erroneous and that he could thereby enable further freedom to those within his charge. Six sigils as pristine as they ever were, but the second, that of his younger sister, gone. The location of her portrait dented and smashed and left such that none could find her even if she wished.

"You don't do things by half, do you, sister?" Murmuring this, Destiny then spoke holding the other six sigils:

"My siblings, I hold your sigils. I call this conclave. It is I, Destiny of the Endless, who call you." 

Each of the sigils sparked and Destiny turned, his realm transformed into a great room and a table with seven seats, and one would be empty. Destiny bit back the words to his brother Destruction that wished to form, pleading for him to see this and understand the fullness of what would come to pass. Even if he sought to defy his future, and so he did, he knew that the very effort to defy it would guarantee it. And so words that would have led Destruction of the Endless to see futility and parallelism when time came were left unspoken and the wheel of Destiny turned.


	2. Conclaves and Dreamscapes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the Endless meet in conclave and life adjusts to a reality where death has ceased to function, Death begins to explore her new home.

AZARATH:

Death found herself in this uninhabited realm striding around, calmly, creating for herself a bed and a crude shelter, not seeking some gaudy testament to her powers. She just knew that though she was but a personification of a concept, mortals had made the Endless in their image and in their likeness enough that sleeping on the ground like the beasts of the worlds in infinite quantity was unthinkable. In the age before humanity, the Endless were not human, and in this realm Death saw still less reason to conform to what humans would have expected to see. All that remained the same was that her skin was bone-white, the hue of the grave and of death, and her clothing a deep and abyssal black. Her footsteps were light, and in this paradise, a realm outside time and space she smiled gently, her body transcending the concepts of space and time and seeming to deform them. For a moment the peaceful place flashed and there seemed to be a great citadel of ivory and gold and a great throne but the moment flashed and she shrugged. Who could say what something or a place like this could be or if the flash was even real? 

THE MEETING HALL OF THE ENDLESS: 

The first of the Endless to enter in response to the conclave was Despair, whose reddish skin was surprisingly bright for a personification of an emotion most mortal species that thought and sang and understood story viewed as dark. She was nude, the nudity of innocence, and the reddish elements were glyphs in languages old when the oldest concepts and gods of the era of humanity were newborn. Her eyes were soft and her gaze was understanding and not unkind, and she understood that in this moment, for a brief span of time, her realm and her power was fluctuating in strength among her kind and some of the gods and less so by far amongst mortals. After her was Delight, whose rainbow-lights were incongrous with the solemnity of the element. A child in seeming form, she showed flashes at times of a teenager, and in that form there was not delight but delirium, insanity, but it was not a form that had yet come to be. After them was Dream, who strode out of his portrait with a thunderous expression of ill-concealed rage, his hand on a great broadsword strapped to him. Dream was gaunt on a good day and rail thin, and on those good days he had a serene majesty about him befitting a king of the largest and most elaborate and populated realms outside Death's own. On a day like today where the towering temper of the Lord Shaper was in full swing he was a monster ill-concealed and he did not waste time on a pretense of politeness to hide it. 

Next strode out Desire, who in contrast to their later forms and shapes of later years did so uncertainly and hesitantly. Of them all, only Desire and the last to emerge in response to the conclave knew the full risks of what had happened and why. Desire on this day was in the eyes of later mortals in red formal gauntlets, their face more masculine than not, though the tawny golden eyes betrayed fear and uncertainty in casting looking everywhere in the room. 

Last stepped in Destruction, a bright and jovial figure much of the time, though here, with his great sword at his side as with Dream's, he was less jovial and more bemused, fingers worrying his mustache and parts of his beard. 

They desired nothing so much, all of them, as to begin to speak at once but it was not so in the pages of Destiny's book, where as the images that at times seemed two-dimensional, like the pages of a comic book, the artwork surrealistic and streaks of light and shadow interplayed, and in reality were a blend of beings simultaneously the creation and the children of mortals and mightier than all gods and dreams and deaths and despairs and desires and delights and destruction and destiny itself in a singular area. Reality groaned beneath the weight of all of their presences together. 

You know why you're here. 

Destiny's voice was flat and it did not brook argument. 

_Yes, brother._ Desire's voice even in fear was a throaty moan that was everything and nothing, the mirage in the desert, the hands that turned all they touched to gold. 

_Our elder sister has departed her position, and her function collapsed. Death, and aye, I say it bluntly, death is no more in the realm of mortals or of Gods. Nor even of our brother's Dreaming. Tell me, brother, how are dear Cain and Abel coping?_

Dream looked at Desire, jaw taught and aching to take his sword and place it at Desire's chest for the slight of not so long ago with that parliament. 

**Not well, brother.** Dream's voice was dark and brooding but had a stark element, each word standing with the clarity of starlight in the deep gloom of the voice of space. **Not in one sense. In another, Cain is happier than I have ever seen him. And sorrowful that he knows, or at least believes it cannot last.**

With that his gaze and his eyes that were universes turned to his brother's eyeless face, and in that same low and dark voice with clear starlight words he did not speak, he hissed and growled like an overmighty animal. 

**So tell me brother, how long will it last?**

Destiny in turn met Dream's gaze levelly and detached. 

It is to last until two find her and bring her back. 

It was then that Delight laughed and for a singular moment in time, the first appearance of Delirium caught her siblings off-guard. 

_ YoU wOn'T fInD HeR sO vErY EaSiLY aS aLl ThaT. ShE doES nOt WAnt tO bE FouNd.  _

Then Delight reappeared, puzzled at the reactions of her siblings. 

_My realm is in the ascendance, same as my sister's!_

She looked to Despair, whose gaze was as detached as Dream's. 

**It is unusual for mortals to be this happy. But.....I am with Dream. This cannot last. They do not understand our sister's gift is as essential to their happiness as our brother's-** and there her gaze turned to Dream. 

Destruction finished ruffling his beard and mustache and spoke slowly and heavily, feeling a sense of destiny and irony in words that he refused to look at too strongly: 

_Bah, she'll be back in a day or two. We can't just quit our functions._

Destiny's gaze to Destruction at that point was eyeless as all the others, yet in the line and alignment of his jaw there was a sense of something wished to be said but left unsaid, and the bitterness of his own function weighing him down. For a moment Destiny wished to emulate his sister and flee. But the moment passed and nothing was said and the Endless then prepared to get to the meat of the conclave, how to deal with the effects to their own realms. 

EMPIRE OF TEARS: 

The efforts of the Guardians of Oa to banish all that had been or would ever be, all of the dreadful forces at work, were left undone by Death abandoning her task and her function. Instead of entrapping the last of the great warlords of the Empire in the same prison with all the others, the dreadful Trigon the Terrible had merrily evaded his conquerors, disappointed that in the new deathless world they were at a stalemate. His power, he realized, to one degree was largely based on the disappearance of she who had abandoned her duties, but so was his freedom. He opted for a moment to wait and to see how things would play out. While the Guardians were stalemated and forced to leave in frustration, and he walked and promised his brothers and sisters great and terrible vengeance with no intention to fulfill this, merely to savor and relish his own freedom, he knew there were other lifeforms in this distant, ancient realm that were the second and the third civilizations to form in Existence itself. 

Trigon reflected that he could go forth and rampage, but if he could not slay, what point to the hollow simulacrum of same? Demonic power lost much of its temptations when the visceral glee of making an Endless dance to his tune was not an ever-present factor. Yet if he sought her out, perhaps......

The entity smiled. Perhaps he could fulfill another desire even if the first could not be. She had broken him to inchoate pieces, but had forgotten a simple rule. When her function ended, so did her power and her ability to banish the mortal that had tried to bind her. All that remained now was to decipher just where she had gone, and to take the next steps to fulfilling his vengeance. A cold and cruel laughter in a rumbling basso since followed and in a flash of sulphur and brimstone Trigon vanished from the Empire of Tears. 

AZARATH: 

Death lolled on the grass, fiddling with a blade of it, savoring the release from the endless burdens of her job, and the beauty and serenity of the place. Her eyes were closed and though she did not truly breathe, the impression of same was nonetheless powerful. 

Then two voices that overlapped spoke, one the thunderous power of a goddess, the other always carrying with it an impression of old age and three women who in distant times to come would assume the flesh of the children of Earth and restore themselves thrice. 

_It is not my time, Madame. Why are you here in my realm?_


	3. The soul of the Devil-Bought Hastens not to its charnel clay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the newly Deathless worlds that lurk beyond space and time, a Psion fleet encounters for the first time an entity that begins to build his own legend. Death herself makes the acquaintance of a Goddess of a religion yet to be born, and ponders: If she is not her function, is she anything at all?

THE SPACE THAT WILL BE COLU: 

Trigon the Terrible thrummed his fingers against his thigh. Ordinarily he would have needed to use at least some magic to shield his body from the impact of the void of space, if a trivial incantation. The arrogant bitch he'd tried to bind and make his thrall had changed many things, among them that the void of space was accessible not merely to the mighty and the great like him, but to any mortals thrown out of their starships. He was bored. He knew he was waiting for something but in the infinity of space that something could take centuries to arise or-he caught a glimpse of a streak of light moving and in a flash of reddish light manifested on the bridge of a Psion ship. 

The Psions did not have time to scream before Trigon's eyes seared out and shattered their bridge, and as they were hurled into the nearby star, he teleported out of the one ship and arrived in the much larger warship, which to its credit actually tried to fire at him. He favored it with a contemptuous look from all four of his eyes before taking his sceptre and unleashing a wave of destruction that crumpled the guns like an elephant squashing a mouse. His was a cold and cruel smile, and as he phased into the ship he quite casually went to work, burning some alive, boiling others' blood in their bodies. Some he transformed the bones into bulbous protrusions that made them seemed swollen, others he got directly down and dirty with by reaching down to grasp them and shred them in half over his knee. None of them died, all of them longed for her but the bitch did not come for them. He was disappointed. Evidently it would need a greater set of atrocities to start to draw her attention. 

AZARATH: 

"I am here because I have quit my job. Death no longer exists." 

The voices were mocking and somewhat cynical when they gave the impression that Something saw her. 

_Yes, I can see that. Death is certainly non-existent lounging on the grass of my realm._

Death's glare was sharp and for a moment even bereft of her function her true power blazed through and Azar found herself humbled. 

"I quit. I am not Death. I can be whatever I want to be. Be whoever I want to be." 

_And yet you still are dressed as the Endless sister, not someone, anyone else._

In a moment the voices formed a body, a woman with platinum blonde hair and a robe of red, but her flesh beneath that was the night sky walking and moving about and it was solely the garment and the hair that gave some guide as to where her person was. Likewise mirroring the being before her, Death exchanged her clothing of black on black for a simple white robe. 

"How's this?"

The voices of Azar laughed, one bitter and mirthless, the other a cold mockery and howl from within the infinite reaches of space and time, the voice of a Goddess whose great enemy was not yet and who knew that enmity was yet to fully be born. 

_Well, it's something, I suppose._

Galactic superclusters holding a set of scintillating stars of ethereal brightness were the equivalents of eyes that gazed at Death. 

_Have you no hobbies? Nothing to do with your time beside your job? The soft voice was just that. Soft and concerned, the booming one was mockery and amusement._

"I've seen myself in some futures collecting mortal headwear."

Both voices snorted derisorily. 

_That's nothing at all, my dear. And if you are not Death, what precisely do you wish to be called? You cannot leave the function and still claim it a name._

Her hands wrapped around her shins, in this case nebulae and galactic superclusters tracing equivalents of veins and arteries and the ridges akin to skin in mortals, and her chin resting on her knees, Death looked out. 

"I know. I wish I knew what name to choose."

_Well, you are a being that arrives when life is born and when it departs. Perhaps Double-Dee?_

"Dee-Dee." 

For a moment she was very human-like, a race yet to be born, all bone-white skin and hair dark as the abyss of the dead of night, and the melancholy broken gaze was such that Azar's own softened. 

_You are welcome to stay here, Didi._

And for a moment Azar was very human-like too, ageless but aged, eyes of bright blue meeting Death's black ones. 

_You are not alone._

A hand touched Death's shoulder and she froze. What if she hadn't-and the hand was fine, a gentle caress. Understanding. Forgiveness, even. 

Death's embrace of her shins tightened. Her chin dug that much more firmly into her knees. It shouldn't have made such a difference but it did. 

She began to sing softly, an old song that her mother Night had sung once when she was still a mother she could call one, before her understanding of her own destiny had led Night and Time to cast her out first. The first rejection. A memory of Time's cold expression so mirroring that of her brother Destruction when he was angry and the cold fury of Night made her flinch. Even the immortal and the embodiments of the greater universal concepts could feel heartbreak and shame that their family, even, did not love them. And if they could not have even a small concession as this, job be damned, did they have anything at all? 

For a moment as the conclave was in a lull in a ferment of ideas, Despair looked up and saw her sister's sorrow and the beginning of tears running down her face. She could not see where she was and she knew that she could not offer full comfort, for that was not altogether her or her responsibility. So Despair of the Endless did as best she could and sent a small whisp of thought and affection to reach Death, and for a moment in Azarath her black hair was ruffled in a breeze eeriely akin to a hand. Azar started, wondering what precisely that meant. 

Death's eyes were no less moist but the small gesture led to the slightest grin before the grin vanished and she held herself, staring blankly. 

She was Didi now, not Death. But if she was not her job......

Maybe Azar was right. For a moment she lifted her head up from her knees, but it was only a moment. Existence was an infinite time and space even for an Endless, even for an Endless who'd left her job and her realm. Even the Endless could fit into this greater picture as just one among many kinds of beings, and for a former one? 

A flash in her eyes lit as she continued to sing. Maybe she was being too pessimistic here. She had freedom, the freedom to do something paradoxical for an entity who embodied both birth and death and yet had limited things to do with the great wide infinite timespan in between. She could live, and actually seek to do so. Didi sang an old song, of Night and of Time when they were young and the universe first began, and it was without form and void and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and a great voice had spoken the words that brought from Time and Night each of their seven children in sequence.....


	4. Devourer of Worlds:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death ponders old sorrows and the War in Heaven takes on a new shape in a Deathless universe

THE HALLS OF NIGHT AND TIME:

She was not the oldest of the Endless, or of the children of Time and Night. Destiny and Dusk were older, so were Shadow and Light and others. She was the first, however, to hear their mother, the great walking night sky speak in a voice of thousands of energies in one:

_Leave, leave and do not return._

_She looked up uncomprehendingly, tears starting to spark in her eyes. Time and Night stared at her, and though tears formed in theirs likewise, their wills were firm._

_Her father repeated her mother's words:_

_Leave, leave and do not return._

_"Why? What have I done?"_

_You were born. Go._

_In sorrow and silence, Death formed for the first time the prototype of her later umbrella and strode out of the halls into the newborn universe, where the very first kinds of life, the Empire of Tears and the Guardians of the Universe were fighting the universe's War in Heaven. Her steps were silent but her tears were not, and where the tears of death fell streaks of darkness formed that would become the later cores of the multiverses, the fulcrums on which events would turn._

_Time looked to Night._

_I.....I do not know that we have done the right thing._

_Of all our children we exile, we shall see but three anew. Her youngest sister, Delirium, her older brother Dream, and her oldest brother Destiny. All of them shall come to us to ask favors. We will see her again, my love. At the end of all things. She is our fate. She does not fully understand that yet but one day she will and her heart will break, and it will break further the more she takes the fractions of her siblings. All of them, even Dream, in the end will fear her. How can they not? She is proof that eternity ends and that the timeless is time-bound._

_Time nodded._

_She should not have been the first._

_No, but she was. And she accepted it._

_They both blanched._

_Ah, when we tell Desire and Destruction to go......_

_With that they stepped within._

The memory parted as Didi finished the song beneath Azarath's crimson skies, and tears flowed anew at the memory of exile and of loneliness, the long long years before her elder brother formed his garden that retroactively seemed to have always existed. And then her younger brother built the Dreaming and each of her siblings their realm. Hers, the Sunless lands, was in all things and nothing and only she was the knower of its secret ways.

A shadow crossed over the elements of the Azarath-that-was, and she looked and she beheld something colossal, male and female alike, all things and nothing.

 ** _Ymir_** , spoke the dual voices of Azar. **_One of the facets of the primordial being to be torn apart by Gods as they come into being, dreamed into awakening by followers. There are others, and other forms. Some like it, some....distinct._ **

For a moment in time the Great Azar took a form akin to that of Didi. Any mortal looking at them would have seen two ageless females of their respective species, one with hair of elderly maturity by the standard of their race, one forever young with hair as dark as Night and a soul old and wearied by endless hatred and shame.

_**Who do you hate, Mistress Death?** _

"I am no-one's mistress now. And I am Death no more. Just.....call me DiDi."

_**Who do you hate, DiDi?** _

"Myself. They tell me that I am wrong to take them, they see me as a failure. As them failing, and because I fulfill my function it is my responsibility to have taken them and to have ruined them and their lives."

Her feet brushed the grass and she relished the feeling and the vulnerability.

_**Why do you believe them?** _

"I am the ending, or I was. The end of life, and the fulfillment of the way the souls take, where they go and how they go there."

She looked at the grass again and smiled briefly.

"If I do not take them, they will be free of everything. No more Death to hate, none to seek to bind me like he did. He knew my......my true name," her lower jaw wibbled. 

"I saw a brief glimpse of what I would have been had I let him continue from that naming and bind me. Craven, weak, bearing him a daughter of darkness to ruin worlds."

The wind on her skin, a sense of how mortals lived. How glorious their lives and how so very wrong she was to deem herself worthy of the task of ending them.

"I couldn't allow it and so I did what I seldom do. I smashed his power."

Azar's hand was on her shoulder. It was a grip of iron like that of a gauntlet in one way, and she almost expected to see it, and it was the gentle half-embrace of a priestess counseling a wayward soul. It was the first comforting embrace Death had had since before her time as the First Outcast. It made her tears flow more freely and great wrenching sobs broke from her as she leaned in and held Azar, whose smile was the warm smile of a priestess and the wrathful hunger of a being of eternal war against the Outer Darkness and its personification, her timeless foe who had driven into her hands the binder and definer of all reality itself.

Her eyes flickered.

THE SILVER CITY:

**Something is wrong, brother.**

The Morningstar, his wings golden and his presence that of a star bound in the form of a person, looked at the only slightly dimmer power and majesty of his brother Michael Demurgios. Michael had spoken that sentence with an unusual strong element of genuine fear in his otherwise stoic nature. He spoke again with that same emotion flavoring the words:

**Something is wrong. Death has stopped.**

_Why is that wrong, exactly?_

The Morningstar looked out.

_I see contentment._

**For now, brother. They hated her. They were wrong to do so.**

_Well yes, brother. Mortals are like that. Weak, foolish. Needing a master, not a father._

Michael's gaze was level and it turned to Lucifer's with an appraising stare.

**Our father is the greatest master of them all and worth service, is he not?**

_Well yes, Michael. It is not wrong to want a master._

The eyebrow rose.

_If what they seek is relief from a boon then they are foolish to want it for that._

Michael nodded.

OA:

The Guardians of the Universe stared across the infinity of existence they could see around them. Everywhere they looked, the process of Death had abruptly and totally ceased. The yellow energies of the personification of Fear had lost much of its power with this, but so too had the Blue entity that underlaid the concept of Hope. The Guardians knew of the Seven Siblings, the concepts that underlaid the universe. Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, Delight. They knew the shadows that overlaid Oa due to the machinations of Desire and the founding mother of their race with Dream. They knew that he was close to her, and that he was courting her. Where this would go, how it would go, what it would mean that an Oan was courted by the personification of Story itself, none knew. 

Of the Seven, but one of them was truly affable and understandable to mortals, and she was the one that had ceased to perform her function. Reality was in limbo. Nothing could die, people, animals, ideas. Gods. Gods that sorely needed killing. Not least among these was the very thing that had tried to bind her after it had discovered her true name and come terrifyingly close to doing so. Trigon the Terrible, embodiment of malevolence and evil, half of a duality. Few were the spheres in the multiverse that neither they nor the Endless nor others could see. Only one of them did they have something of a name thereof.

Azarath. A realm of crimson skies and sweet smells, a realm outside of time and space, removed from elements of the Omniverse. Alternately, a citadel of ivory and gold raised over the ashes of a fallen world laid low by a terrible catastrophe. In either case a realm purified of mortal failings, one element less terrifying than the other but both equally terrifying.

Apokilips and New Genesis, the twin worlds that had arisen just after Oa, embodiments of divine potentials that always were and yet were yet to be, they were not fully formed yet. Yet Azarath in its eternal timelessness already existed, as did Trigon, its archenemy.

Said foe had laid low worlds and hewn and ravaged his way through them, and had seen that worlds did not die, did not die in truth. Not pleasantly. Nor slowly, nor cleanly. Nor did those within starships. He had laid low a fleet one of one of the few younger races in the realm that would come to be known as Vega. The Psions, a new race that had encountered one of the universe's worst horrors.

Now, he was en route to another world, and to the God that awaited on that world, a being of towering majesty and fury.

It would be an interesting confrontation. Trigon embodiment of cosmic darkness, and the entity later eras would come to know as Shazam, binder of the Seven Deadly Sins, a factor that would lead the Father of Old Night to seek to empower sons and daughters with the energies of those same concepts, with inconsistent success.

The Guardians scryed further. Death's removal was still a thing of cheer to most. The Psions burning eternally in the outer edges of the star and unable to die were the first to grasp what her absence meant.

So too, soon, would the first of the entities that would become the dawn of the Gods of the star Sol, Khaos. If she had not vanished it would have been its time to break and to spawn its first descendants, but it was no longer able to fulfill what it needed to fulfill. The lumpen mass of thousands of eyes and teeth screamed impotently into an uncaring void. Reality trembled in its wake. And in that same corner around the Earth, a necropolis containing an ancient entity bound in dreaming-death. In one tiny corner of existence, dreaming-death became dreaming and the necropolis began to glow with a terrible light that seeped without less like a star and more like a waypoint.

Thrumming energy began to echo through time and space. It was like a heartbeat. Something that had been dead was dreaming, and the Dreaming itself began to ripple.

THE DREAMING, DREAM'S CASTLE:

**I feel it, Lucien.**

The Lord of the Dreaming's voice was outwardly calm and his eyes, those liquid pools of starlight, gazed with an awareness that terrified his creation.

**I know what it is. Bring me my helmet. Destiny was right.**

A heartbeat sounded and the dreaming rippled. Dream's jaw set. Let the thing that dreamed seek to challenge his realm if it dared. It was a thing of stories, too, from one point of view. And he was no mere story, he was their Lord and their Shaper.


	5. Star Light, Star Bright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Death remains in Azarath, the truth of deathlessness begins to sink in. Wars begin to spread in the deathless multiverse, and what was once one begins to become two.

THE SEA OF SOULS:

Billions of years into the future the Entity of Life and Nekron would not remember that they had once been a singular entity, nor that their realms were once a unified whole. In the age when the Guardians of Oa were a new race, and the Psions of the Citadel first emerging in the vast planetary system around the star Vega, theirs was a distinct sphere, a mirror in a very dim element of that known to be the domain of the eldest sister of the Seven. Death was death itself in all its forms, and in her increasingly sorrowful case was its finality. Theirs the sphere of the energies produced by her actions. In metaphysics as in physics, what is done produces energy and a reaction in proportion to its nature. As each soul was taken to the sunless lands the energies of the Endless went to the Sea, where the entity known as the Judge decided which souls were to be released and which delegated to be stored for a distant day.

A day when the firstborn of mortal life on the planet Oa produced great protectors, shielding the Galaxy. When new gods arose to match that of the new civilizations. When Highfather and Uxas laid low portions of the Galaxy in an endless strife. Then would an ancient prophecy from the Empire of Tears whose sole survivor bestrode the Galaxy in towering fear anew come to pass. The dead would rise, and the Sea of Souls go forth to its destiny. Such had been the course of affairs.....and then suddenly the water that flowed into the Sea of Souls dried up and the Sea trembled.

Its master on his vast throne, it a mirror of him in the right being skeletal and dark as the deep abyss of the oceans of worlds that had water, the left white and bllindingly so like starlight woven into a vaguely Oanoid form, gazed with concern.

**How can this be?**

He did not know, not truly, but he had a good reason to suspect.

**Of all that kindred I would not have believed her capable of this.**

As he summoned the power that let him See what was there to be Seen, he looked out. And his gaze froze in blank horror. The stars......the stars were changing.

They were beginning to become like little spheres of ice.

When the first of the personification of the stars awoke in its realm, the Judge decided he must act. He must find a way.

He summoned to himself the great scythe in his hand and slammed it onto the dais of his throne. In a blinding Yin-Yang sphere he vanished.

THE ROCK OF ETERNITY:

Trigon smiled coldly as he hovered at the edge of the rock. For a time he had seemingly been stymied by the power of the wards the Sorcerer set, but in truth it was gauging them for weakness. Shazam had in his realm bound seven concepts, the dark mirrors of the various Endless. Pride, the eldest, the mirror of selfless Destiny. Wrath, the mirror of ever-loving death. Envy, the mirror of ever-ruling Lord Shaper. Lust, mirror of ever-destructively tempting Desire. Sloth, mirror of ever-hulking Destruction. Gluttony, mirror of the obese Despair. Greed, the shadow-aspects of Delight of the Endless. And like her ever-youngest and yet ancient, more ancient than the entities that sought to command that power.

His kin in the Empire of Tears were bound by the things on Oa, and Trigon had not the least intent to free them. They had been fools and he was wise. As he hovered in the void of space, he created a vast scepter that resembled a thing of bone and then slammed it into the wards, which crackled into visible existence, and then his eyebeams struck the weakness he'd identified. Even magic could not create sound in the silent void, but Trigon did not need it. With contentment he hovered into the Rock, feeling empowered by the presence of the demonic entities.

Trigon's visions of the future were inconsistent, at times. Often he saw himself as father of a Daughter of Darkness capable of matching his powers, even exceeding them. She, alone of all entities sharing his bloodline. And at times she was one of four, with three sons, Belial, Ruskoff, and Suge. And then at times she was one of Seven, Belial the other name of Wrath, Ruskoff of Envy, Suge of Lust....but four further offspring. Trigon did not in truth care which was true, but he did know that a pale woman with dark hair and dark eyes was his destined bride. The Endless had spurned his desires, and she would pay for that. And when he had bred that which defined all life and existence itself, and his rightful heir was born, Existence itself would yield to its new master.

Here, in the Rock, he felt the power of the Seven Sins and his daemonic essence drank them in with endless hunger and avarice, his eyes flashing coldly and ruinously.

**_I am here, Sorcerer!_ **

His voice boomed out. To his north a voice spoke calmly: 

You have no authority here, son of darkness. Depart in peace.

**_I have not come in peace, Sorcerer. I will not depart save as master of this Rock._ **

A flash of mystic unlight and an entity hovered before him rather less human than his appearance in later years. He was vaguely Oanoid but taller, with a head more proportionate to body size, nearly as bulky and hulking as Trigon himself.

SHAZAM!

With a call of his own name a massive bolt of lightning struck the demon Trigon, who braced himself and formed his arms into an X shape with an excited grin. The bolt struck him.....and there he remained, if with charring on his forearms that he dispelled with annoyance.

The Sorcerer froze.

**_If she were here, you would have perhaps sent me away with that blast. She isn't here, sorcerer. She has abandoned her sphere._ **

SHAZAM!

Another bolt of lightning, then another, then another.

Trigon stood there increasingly bored and then his scepter flashed into being and was raised over his head, drawing energy from Trigon's own powers and those of the entities within the Rock. Slamming it into the ground Shazam was hurled backward, Trigon looking at him bored.

_**Is that all you got?** _

When Shazam hovered in front of him and began to form runes in the air in circular patterns, Trigon stood with indecision. Four runes, not seven, each blazing with a light that burned into the Sight of a demonic force.

SHAZAM!

From the runes burst four strands of light that sought to bind Trigon's arms and slam into his chest. Trigon found his arms grasped in a powerful grip that outmatched his own for raw strength, then snarled at a much deeper infrasound level that rattled the very foundation of the Rock. Runes blazed into existence on Trigon's own form, the most prominent shaped somewhere between that the future writers in the Roman alphabet would see as the Arabic numeral 5 and the letter S. The power that bound Trigon became as ashes and he tore his limbs free, and then his eyebeams surged out.

Blast after blast hurled at the Wizard, whose shields held with strength, if not entirely with ease.

Trigon snarled, unaccustomed to defiance of his own imperious gaze.

As he prepared to raise his scepter, the secondary runes the Sorcerer had prepared suddenly blazed into life and he spoke an incantation taught to him a long time ago in a dream where he had spoken to a woman with white hair and a red robe, who upon speaking it seemed clad in dark green armor on a great golden throne before reverting back to her true self. The power of Azar surged against that of the Demon and Trigon found himself struck for the first time by the sheer raw immensity of his future nemesis, hurled out of the Rock, the blast strong enough.....

He smiled coldly. In his hands were shards of each of the seven statues. Shards that would go into his offspring that would be born, the ones that would become his true companions. In the silent void his mouth fell open in what would have been laughter, as he placed them within a pocket dimension of his own manufacture. That had been a pleasurable experience. So too the encounter with the creatures on Vega.

With that Trigon teleported himself to sector 666, where he found himself gazing at a newborn entity that had awoken from his rebirth.

**_And what are you supposed to be?_ **

**I AM THE BUTCHER! I AM RAGE! I AM HATE! I SHALL MAKE THE GALAXY BLEED IN AN OCEAN OF BLOOD AND BUILD MYSELF A GREAT THRONE OF SKULLS.**

Trigon snorted, and prepared to turn only for the entity to lurch toward him.

It was as he turned and prepared himself to fight that he noticed something....else. The stars, he froze. The stars were wrong.

THE DREAMING:

Clad in his battle-helm Dream of the Endless strode in the deeper recesses of the Dreaming, the very most dangerous. They were the true concepts themselves, each of his siblings and he himself. But where he was Dream, there were other things, old and strong, that had power to various levels of his realm, things that it was his task given from another thing that had come from the realm of Seven Suns when he had departed the realms of Time and Night to begin to create his own kingdom to keep them slumbering in their shards here. He only vaguely remembered the entities that had spoken to him, one male-seeming, one female-seeming. They had spoken in perfect unity with a singular voice that mirrored itself twice over.

Down he strode, into the recesses where the cities that already were and would be slumbered.

Down he strode, into the areas where the Gods that were already born were there and where those yet to be awaited birth.

Down he strode, and then he was there, at the Dream-lands where the thing that had been Dead but Dreaming now Dreamed.

Mighty was its presence even in a dim shadow of a shadow, for it was a thing that transcended time and space. From the stars it had come and brought its images with it. A lord it had been in the region of the Star Sol, and its shadowy aftermath would do much to shape elements of strangeness around that world.

Here, in this portion of Dreaming, angles did not conform to the patterns mortals would have preferred. A strange kind of sliminess was rife, and a sound echoed, followed by another. First singly, and then together.

_Cthulhu._

_Ftaghn._

_Cthulhu ftaghn!_

In the realm that Dream stood before, he could sense the change. Dreaming-Death, the place where his sister as with he served to keep the thing in its prison, had become Dream.

From the abyssal realm he gazed into he heard a voice:

**_So my jailor comes to see his captive. May this be your fate one day, Lord Shaper. You, mightiest of all that is in the realm of Story bound and left as an object to gaze for lesser entities that gawk like children in the presence of a titan._ **

An immense presence moved, a mountain that awoke from its slumber and sat in chains, six eyes of blazing green light looking toward him.

**_Your sister's power is silent. And it took both of you to hold me down. The stars are becoming right for me, little Endless. What shall you do when the entities that shape you and your kin become as me and mine?_ **

The voice was mocking and it was cold, and the power within it made the icy stars tremble and bow before the entity that had shaped them in the time before time.

**_That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons......_ **

The entity rose to its feet, the chains at its wrists and ankles pulling very taught, and it leaned forward. Vast tendrils reached out, each far longer and wider than Dream and his entire realm, as he gazed into six eyes, two clusters of three bright neon green against a much darker green hue.

**_Even Death shall Die!_ **

Dream stared in determination. Mighty as the Dreamer in the Crypt might be, this was his realm, and he had power here.

AZARATH:

DiDi stared at the grass, the memories of her parents having disturbed her more than she wished to admit. The sense of loss from being sent out from their halls bothered her. She would never see them again until the end of time, when the stars falling silent and taken by her would leave her mother diminished, needing relief from the miseries of an overlong existence. When the very end of all things meaning that Time no longer had meaning and her father abdicating his position to her....leaving only herself and her brother Destiny. For all that, she was still a being with parents who missed them and the rejection stung.

She looked up, enchanted by the beauty of this place. Azarath was not yet the full temple it would become in future years when the Goddess would hit upon her last scheme to destroy her future foe and the one that would bring true success, and the great gamble with it. It was still peaceful with those crimson skies and the essence of calm about it. Outside all time and space and yet......it was in that strange realm that she felt the dim shadows of what her brother did. Something that had been Dead Yet Dreaming now awoke and sought to menace him.

Part of her ached to retake her Ankh, to simply end all of what her leaving her job would mean. But......

She sighed. So many years had she done all this, and all that got her was the immense and hulking presence of the demon Trigon trying to turn her into a broodmare, after all the anger and scorn. From there to what he had tried to do. There was no sense to this. Or to her job. The temptation faded.

Her presence likewise changed, from the image of a young girl clad in black to something of her truer nature. Finality and Renewal entertwined. Great wings formed anew and in them was the light of stars and whirling galaxies, the light not the icy transformations of decaying physics, but the true starlight of healthy astrophysics. Her eyes were brilliant and neither light nor magic nor the eyes of the energy of souls. Her body was the deep shadows of her Sunless Lands, very vaguely Oanoid, her height that of a towering giant many times larger than Azar even at her greatest.

The Goddess took her own form, a very corvid-like great bird, a bone-hue of light to contrast with the stygian hue of Death.

She looked with curiosity where Death did but she could not see what DiDi did. As that which was Dead Dreamed, she caught a small glimpse of what her brother had seen in the old days when they had worked together in the areas where their realms met, fastening the bars on the great tomb shut. 

Azar could not see what DiDi saw, but she heard it. A thin whining, something akin to that of a mosquito but louder, jarring edges to it giving it the impression of a colossal cracked flute. Low echoing sounds, sometimes singularly and sometimes in a vast continuous droning that worked in curious harmony with the flute. And a sound beyond that as of a gigantic.....entity...in motion. Later generations would call what was seen the world behind the Source Wall, and it was the only time in all her long life that Azar would see beyond it. Never in all her long life would she regret anything so much as the brief chance to see as the Endless saw.

The moment would pass for her but Death stood as a giant visible in the crimson skies looking at it, an indecipherable expression on her face. 

Then her wings extended outward, vast and lengthy as those of the creatures the children of Earth would come to call an Albatross, and they moved, as she moved up into the skies over Azarath, glorying in her freedom. Teeth that were akin to starlight shone from her face and she laughed, in a musical sense.

Why was she stuck in a job that made her so sad and became a personality trait? Her function did not define her unless she allowed it to do so. Here, Death had died. Here, she was free. She moved in her freedom in a lazy circle, relishing that existence was freed of her burden, and surely the more grateful for it.


	6. Break and Forge the Stars Anew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Judge encounters the deathless realm and in reality's unraveling, the future's will is sown. The Butcher and the Terrible clash in the Forbidden Zone, and DiDi tries further to become someone new.

SECTOR 666:

Trigon's distraction did not last long, and he turned to the vast bull-headed minotaur-like creature that stood before him. It was Wrath on a still greater level, and Trigon's smile was cold and cruel as he looked upon it.

**_I am the last of the Empire of Tears, Butcher. I am a demon, the last demon of the kind unconnected in all truth to that plane that is yet to be born. To me, Sin is food, it is my very essence._ **

The Butcher roared:

**YOU ARE A DEMON, A SCION OF EVIL. NOT AN ACCURSED CREATURE OF THE GREEN-REALM.**

The demon smiled with a fanged leer.

_**Hence why I seek to glut myself on a feeding greater than any I would have had festering until my future destiny comes to pass.** _

The Butcher roared again, and lunged this time in full power at Trigon, who stood with his scepter held in a kind of mocking salute. The power of the Butcher flooded into him and Trigon for the first time began to swell and grow, from twice as large and wide as a man to a living mountain, his scepter growing with him.

 _ **I did warn you**_ , Trigon sighed, and then the scepter collided with the Butcher, which found itself hurled upward into the sky with a startled 'Rurrh? and the tremendous antisound of the impact and a flash of light marking its impact. it hovered now over a vast giant swollen on its power, gazing at him with a cruel amusement.

**_Come then, entity of rage. Glut me more. You were saying something about 'Skulls for the Skull Throne?'_ **

The entity roared again and lunged at Trigon who seemed to be growing still larger, dark stripes forming on parts of his body, hooves digging deep into the soil. Another impact of the scepter collided with the Butcher and drove it back into the chains that it had escaped, as Trigon loomed down, one colossal knee near it, the hoof digging into the ground a bit to his northwest.

 _ **My thanks, Butcher. I have fed from you in great contentment. I shall give your regards to Parallax**_ , and with a mocking laughter Trigon vanished, appearing at a much broader corner two galaxies away.

The creature that turned to see him was reptilian and amphibian-seeming in a vague sense in the eyes of mortals, an eye-aching and unholy Golden hue.

 **Parallax** , Trigon's voice was mocking. **_Entity of Fear and another source of the power of Sin. I have glutted myself on power from the Butcher. That was pleasure. This?_ **

Trigon cracked his scepter into his hand.

_**The Endless escaped me the last time I sought to bind her, because on my own I was not strong enough. Nothing can die now, but that only means the more power to siphon, to relish, to savor. Energy enough that when I find the Endless I shall make her kneel, and from her all of them.** _

_Such bloody ambition_ , spoke Parallax in a condescending tone. _Worthy of the simpletons of the Empire of Tears. Infinite power and all you can think to do with it is to be the crude mirror of what the mortals call a God._

_**That is what I am. The darkest of all the nightmare-gods, bereft of ties to the Dreaming. And it is what I am that makes me act as I do.** _

_Somehow the Endless did not agree with that._

_**I drove her away, once. I did this. I had that power, greatest of all things, but it was not quite enough to contain her. Now, Parallax, now I shall gain more, infinitely more, and become as one of them myself and make a bonfire of that which cannot die, and then she shall come to me.** _

_As I said, a plan of the subtlety that saw your kind bound by the mortals. Your having the simple wit to evade an obvious trap does not make you great, Trigon. The Oans shall never bind me._

Trigon snorted, his laughter rippling into the mindspeech of Parallax.

**_I have unfinished business with Death of the Endless. I cannot glut her maw, but I do not need to. And you will not deny me my wishes._ **

THE VOID NEAR THAT WHICH WILL BECOME COLU:

The Judge walked the infinite void of space unharmed, bemused. The interstellar medium with its terrible heat and radiation was silent. Ice began to stalk space, and the stars......

He stood near the star that the future planet Colu would orbit around, staring at it with curiosity. It had been a vast ball of plasma and now it was an equally vast thing of light become as ice. Death was not present. Entropy, the process that ignited light within stars, was part of Her sphere. It too fed the Sea of Souls the Judge presided over. And now the stars were not dying, but they were not living, either. Silence, infinite and remote, and the stars becoming an improbable thing that could not sustain itself. The Judge moved closer, noting that in the absence of Death physics was starting to go asunder. The gravity of the star would have destroyed the material shell of even one such as he in the past but now......Now it was no more than that of a mere mortal.

The Judge stood on the ice of an unliving star, and marveled. So this was the realm without death. Neither a Blackest Night nor a Brightest Day. Just......starlight become as ice and harmless. Radiation, with its very existence interwoven into the sphere of Death as her function at its smallest and most frequent level, itself rendered inert.

The Judge's eyes looked up, a bright white one within the obsidian right, a singularity-darkness within the bone-hued left. Reality bubbled and trembled. The wave rippled outward and the ice of the star rippled with it and hurled outward in shrapnel. In a blinding vortex of light and a light-devouring vortex of darkness, what was once one became as two. One was a being of brilliant white light, brilliant wings spreading out like those of a great bird of prey. The other was an all-consuming darkness marked with bands of white, traces of the old unity of the two (as small streaks of darkness in the entity of Life likewise were the traces of the old Judge). Clasping the scythe that had once united them, Nekron turned to the Entity of Life.

**Well, then.**

The first two words of the entity that more than most would come to be feared by the Guardians of the Universe.

The Entity of Life looked at its twin and future arch-nemesis.

_Well._

With that, both decided to part ways, the memories of having been one too powerful to deny. Only the passage of billions of years and the slow and studied degeneration of Nekron's motives and opportunism when the time came right for his schemes would lead to their future strife.

Nekron strode in a deathless world, an entity empowered by a force that was silent beyond all else. It felt.....strange.

AZARATH:

DiDianded from her flight in gracefulness, taking on an image akin to a very tall Psion. Her white dress had changed, slightly, to become a slit dress, the slit very high up the thigh. Her shoes were now boots that came up to mid-calf, heeled ones that for a mortal would have been somewhat uncomfortable and impractical, but for a personification of the universe were no more than a mere matter of detail. Her robes were longer, with an avian-style hood, one that cast shadows on the upper part of her face, though her eyes gleamed with a yellowish light beneath them. On the fringes of the robes were glyphs and symbols, sigils of Death of the Endless and of hidden things.

In the image of the future monastery did DiDi turn to the deity that monastery would revere.

Azar took her own form again, clad in the image of the walking night sky with reddish robes.

**I do like that look.**

DiDi's smile was warm and welcoming. She laughed with a silvery joy.

_**I thought you might.** _

DiDi strode around Azarath, looking at the emptiness of its planes that at times were vast and towering birdlike architecture and at other times an equally imposing cyclopean ivory and gold citadel. Her smile was calm and confident, and then she knelt at what would become the Doors of Night, she concentrated and focused, willing her power as one of the Endless to go into creation. Destiny had made his maze and his statue. Dream an entire sprawling realm of fierce and wondrous and awe-inspiring (and sometimes dreadful) denizens.

By inches and degrees metal began to weave out of the emptiness before Azar. Golden, with white streaks, as with the Door of Night, beyond which would be all manner of terrors in the infinity of years to come. By degrees did the atoms combine to form particles of what was and was not metal, and the wards of Azarath changed and moved and stirred. Mighty was Azar, a multiversal being of Undying Flame, she who would destroy the only surviving force of the Empire of Tears that in billions of years to come would be reborn through the sacrifice of her greatest priestess. And before the power of the eldest sister of the Endless, she felt very small and very weak.

A door formed, as large and as small as that which beheld it wished. DiDi stood back, hands on her hips, smiling.

**There. A creation to enhance your wards here. In time to come, one shall go beyond that door at the summoning of another, and she shall bring my gift to this place.**

She mused detached, then turned and strode around the meadows glorying in their stillness.

**_I missed this kind of thing with my mother and father, you know?_ **

**I do not know, lady. I know only that I exist, and I do not know how it is that I do or that I came to do so.**

DiDi's smile was gentle.

**_You are of my brother's realm as all gods and goddesses are. Mortals dream you into being. Your enemy is ancient, and you are in a duality with him, so you are as ancient as he._ **

**I.....do not find that comforting, lady.**

**_I never said that it was._ **

Azar's lip quirked in a slightly spastic fashion.

**Point conceded.**


End file.
